Freemarker Container to JSON

Kind of a random post, but at work we’ve been trying to find a good way to dump a Freemarker object to JSON. I finally found a nice solution online, but it wasn’t even described as having the ability to do what it does, and now I can’t find the source of it. Hopefully this will help someone else out in the future, and if this code looks familiar, please let me know where it’s from so I can cite the source properly.

The following code will take a Freemarker sequence, hash, or collection (or a mixture of all three) and dump the contents to the page as JSON. It may work with other Freemarker data types as well, but I have not tested it. It’s currently a macro, but I think it would be fairly easy to convert it to a function as well.

Well, what ever is rendering the freemarker template on the server would be passing in the JSON. Freemarker itself cant accept a POST or PUT, so your server code would have to accept the data and then process it.